This soup was never really planned. It was the product of what came after. After a holiday meal, feeding a dozen or more people during Thanksgivings and Christmases on The Farm. My grandparents 25 acre property complete with roaming horses and dogs, tall black walnut and magnolia trees. A nightly bonfire in the "inside yard", the small fenced area housing the small dogs and the relatives antics. I remember vividly the smoke, the crackling leaves of the magnolia trees as they succumb to the flames after children threw them in. The laughter and excitement at this small personal firework display.
A holiday ham was an extravagance, a spiraled brown sugared delight. My grandparents, having grown up in depression times and world wars, believed in making the most of what they had and not being wasteful. Once everyone had eaten their fill, the ham bone still had work to do. Little chunks of meat still clinging to the bone, tossed into a slowly simmering stockpot, it became the base for another whole meal made from some of the least expensive things in the kitchen: potatoes, cabbage, carrots, onions, salt and pepper.
The potatoes are important here. I recommend Russets, as they cook, their edges begin to break apart and disappear into the broth, giving it a slightly grainy, starchy richness without flour, cream, or any other added thickener.
There aren't many measurements that need to be exact. This is a use-what-you-have soup. The size of the ham bone determines the pot, the pot determines the water, and everything else follows.
Ingredients
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1 leftover spiral ham bone, with some meat still attached
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Any remaining cooked ham you'd like to add
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3–4 pounds russet potatoes
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4–6 carrots
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1–2 large onions
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1 large head green cabbage
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Water, enough to cover the ham bone
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Plenty of freshly ground black pepper
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Salt, to taste
Make the Ham Broth
Place the ham bone in a large 5- to 6-quart stockpot. Add enough water to cover it.
Bring the water to a boil, then reduce to a steady simmer. Cover partially and let the ham simmer until the remaining meat is tender and the water has become a rich, flavorful ham broth, about 1½–2 hours.
Remove the bone from the pot and let it cool enough to handle.
Pull off any remaining usable ham, roughly chop or shred it, and return the meat to the broth. Discard the bone and any large pieces of fat or gristle.
Add the Vegetables
Cut the potatoes into generous chunks. You can peel the potatoes if that is your preference, but I recommend leaving the peels on. Peel and slice the carrots. Peel and roughly chop the onions.
Add the potatoes, carrots, and onions to the ham broth.
Season generously with black pepper. Hold back on the salt for now. Ham can contribute quite a bit of its own.
Simmer until the carrots are tender and the potatoes are completely fork-tender, with some beginning to soften and break apart around the edges.
Don't fight that.
Those potatoes are thickening the soup.
Add the Cabbage
Remove any damaged outer leaves from the cabbage and cut the head into four large quarters, removing the toughest part of the core while leaving the quarters mostly intact.
Lay two cabbage quarters over the top of the soup. Cover the pot and allow them to steam and wilt until they've collapsed enough to make room.
Add the remaining two quarters.
Cover again and continue cooking until all of the cabbage is completely tender and has settled down into the broth.
Stir everything together gently. Some of the cabbage will separate into ribbons and some of the potatoes will break apart. That's exactly what you want.
Taste the broth.
Add more black pepper. Probably more than you think.
Then add salt only if it needs it.
What You're Looking For
The finished soup should be somewhere between broth and stew: hearty without being heavy, with tender cabbage, pieces of ham and carrot, and plenty of potatoes.
The broth won't be perfectly clear or silky. The russets give it a slightly grainy, starchy body as they break down. It should taste deeply of ham and black pepper, with the sweetness of long-cooked cabbage and onion underneath.
Serve it hot, preferably the day after the ham that started the whole thing. You can also freeze your ham bone, and make this deeply flavorful soup another time.
The Point of the Recipe
This was a meal made from what remained after an expensive holiday dinner.
The ham bone wasn't garbage. It was broth.
The scraps of meat weren't too small to matter. They were tomorrow's dinner.
And inexpensive staples like cabbage, carrots, onions, and potatoes could stretch what remained into a stockpot big enough to feed a family again.
Recipes like this are worth keeping not because they're complicated, but because they teach something larger than how to make dinner:
Use what you have. Waste as little as you can. And know how to turn what remains into something SO SO good.
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